‘The History years‘ – Originally published 7th March 2001 in York Vision

Matt Goddard wonders what he’s going to do in the mornings now Simon Mayo’s ‘gone on to better things’.

“SIMON MAYO IN THE MORNING, HE’S NO LONGER YAWNING… Anymore… La, la, la, la, la, One FM”. Blur rings out and suddenly you’re in the past and the present at the same time – oh, and in bed.

It’s all so reassuring.

It was the same on the morning of 16 February when an era ended. After 15 years, Simon Mayo left Radio One and took some important parts of my teenage memories with him.

Now, I know not all of you care about Radio One or particularly Simon Mayo, but I also know a lot of other, equally distraught people. Mope. You don’t HAVE to carry on reading this, but in writing it I’m attempting to vindicate the hundreds of hours I’ve spent listening to Mayo’s show rather than doing something slightly more important.

Mayo’s show was the mainstream movie-show of choice.
It’s not that Radio One had the best critics.
Oh, no, no, no…”

Somehow he showed more innovation in his dead-pan presentation than anyone, and managed to justify that lie-in until 12 on a Thursday morning. If I woke up in time, I’d guess the ‘Mystery Years’, then just lie-in to hear ‘Dead or Alive’, oh, and then just a bit longer to hear ‘King of the Movies’ (or the oh-so-superior One World), then the ‘Eleven-Thirty-Three’ or ‘Millennium Anthems’ oh, and then to hear who Wicky-Wah-Wah-Will’s been that day. After that I’m chucked out of bed by Jo Wiley.

No more. Much as I love Jo on Channel Four at midnight, she’s single-handedly solving my lie-in problem.

There were other jewels in the 9-12 show: ‘God of the Week’ constantly confirmed what you always thought about Jim Carrey or David Duchovny. When producer George ‘regenerated’ into Producer Will last year I laughed for hours – it’s the little attentions to detail that make a show. Sara Cox take note.

A big bonus was the fact that I’m a movie-lover. Mayo’s show was the mainstream movie-show of choice. It’s not that Radio One had the best critics. Oh, no, no, no. Yet the BBC gave Mayo the biggest budget for ridiculously high concept prizes and his team had the ingenuity to match. Perhaps by the end, they were losing it (how many times was the lame ‘Kind of the Movies’ competition won by the fastest search engine?) but there are great memories.

Last year, the fantastic’ One World’ shifted into ‘One World is Not Enough’ for the 19thJames Bond film. The prize escapes me, but I couldn’t stop uttering the catchphrase for weeks. The fantastic Matrix competition to see the premiere in Paris; all the finalists lost, and Jo Wiley had to wait while Mayo did what he does best. Oh, and don’t forget the Phantom Menace compo, the only element of Star Wars: Episode One which lived up to the hype.

His last show was suitably impressive. Some of the familiar parts of had to go for times-sake, but ending on a Lemmy comment and Ace of Spades: Genius.

Moby, Terrorvision, Feeder, a very ingratitude Travis, Everclear all sent in messages of tribute and I think everyone was surprised by some impromptu interludes from The Shirehorses and the Proclaimers.

Special mention has to go to ‘The Mystery Years’. You don’t know what you’ve got ‘til it’s gone. It’s been around for as long as I can remember, but obviously it’s got easier as it went on; more nineties-centric. The favourite year by far on the day was 1996, and what a year it was. The Manic’s Design for Life’ slid into the Prodigy firestarting. And to end on Oasis’ Don’t Look Back in Anger – does that song make a great conclusion to everything? Sure, back then Oasis were the biggest band in the world, but anyway 1996 was fantastic. Yep, it was my long post-GCSE summer, so it was particularly great for me.

Mayo’s apparently going to resurrect ‘The Mystery Years’ in may on Five Live, but it just won’t be the same in the afternoon. Especially clashing with Mark and Lard.

A typically BBC quote went up on the website – whoever said they weren’t diplomatic? – but what are they up to? Like Mayo on the said morning, I don’t think there’s a need to slag off their aggressive radio policy. However, Mayo isn’t DLT. The last year has seen them ditch the Roadshow all in favour of the One-World, One Love slogan and Leeds street parties. Sure, sounds great – I know the world’s changing but I’m being made to feel old by BBC execs just a few years older than me. What about my day? Don’t they know how disturbing it is to wake up at 10, hear Jo Wiley and think it’s the afternoon? It’s messing with ME.

His leaving present which reminds him of Radio One, a mirror and a razorblade.
That’s because everyone here is so smart and clean shaven obviously’

Sure there were slights at the BBC on Mayo’s last day, most notably the last questionnaire, annunciated by Angus Deayton. He asked a representative number of people, ‘Apart from joining FiveLive, what else could Simon Mayo have done next?’

‘3% said sit back and admire his leaving present which reminds him of Radio One, a mirror and a razorblade. That’s because everyone here is so smart and clean shaven obviously’.

Hmmmm. As the last day suggested, not many ex-Radio one DJs go on to bigger and better things (Simon Dee, Simon Bates, Mike Reid, DLT..?). Ii hope Mayo’s an exception. At least he gets to have a lie-in of student standards now. It’s easy to forget he was with Radio One for 15 years. In any line of work that’s amazing, least of all fickle Radio One.

He even managed to hold the breakfast Show for five years, imagine that now.

Oh well, maybe it’s good Mayo’s left. After all, I can get up early, so some stuff, not waste money or time phoning the BBC and get a degree. Yeah, whatever, bring back 1996.”

JokerMatt subsequently scraped a degree and his ‘One World is Not Enough’ impression still has it.

The Mystery years subsequently resurfaced on the Chris Moyles Show – another 15 year Radio 1 alumni, with a record eight years on the breakfast show – and Simon Mayo has been reconnected with Mark Kermode to once again take the mantle as BBC’s Mr Film.

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A first Jokerside post to break the rule… Radio may not be discussed here much, but this time it’s personal. I’m in a quandary: unless my wine taste radically falls in line with Scott Mills, and that probably wouldn’t buy me much time, Radio 1 is now off limits. Now I just don’t know where to take my morning ‘non-visual speak time/hit snooze button time’. Yep, Chris Moyles has emphatically left the building and crossed the road…

TIME TO TOUGHEN UP. Eras are forever ending. It’s time’s fault. Stupidly, religiously and unrelentingly travelling forward. In some parts of the universe there must be eras ending every micro-second. On this small planet we now generally count them best according to knowledge: cultural and technological. While some people may strictly measure only the most significant eras, a few hundred epochs of ice or dinosaurs, others may choose monarchs, stamps or nationalised rail networks.

Nowadays, in these ever more ‘connected’ and fast moving times, it can be easier to adopt eras that are, well, fittingly shorter. Small, generationally defining time periods are now used to measure the most important things that have ever existed in the world – that would be: music, TV and film (imagine that brewing X-Factor: The Movie epoch…). Basically, it’s those sound waves that have been broadcast for a hundred years to those small pockets of the universe where any casual listeners may properly describe Tony Blackburn’s broadcasting career as an Eon. Whatever your view of an era – personal, peer or galactic – one thing is for certain: they end.

And so yesterday morning, not less than three years after Sir Terry Wogan stepped from his TOG tower in Broadcasting House, Chris Moyles ended his tenure as BBC Radio 1’s longest running breakfast show host.

I’ve listened to Moyles since his arrival on Radio 1 and I can measure parts of my life against his BBC career: A-levels to his Saturday show, sorting stock in HMV to his afternoon show and then, well, my post-education career slumming as he landed his dream job. But that isn’t very significant. I can equally measure my biography against Red Dwarf, Eastenders and even non-BBC brands, but it’s certainly more than I can do with Eamonn Holmes.

Having read the first of Moyles’ biographies, I’ve always liked his rather healthy career ethic: if you’re good the money will just follow. I also liked the way he built and rebuilt teams at different points like Nick Fury. I oddly liked his non-fussy, and not very specific music knowledge. I liked his constant attempts to translate onto the small screen, his most successful being a pub quiz. But most of all I liked him because occasionally, not everyday but occasionally, he made me burst into uncontrollable hysterical laughter. Especially over the last eight years, that is no mean feat in the morning. I’ve even seen him make sworn Moyles-haters laugh. His conversion rate was quite impressive when given the chance. His is a cleverly sculpted mix of hard preparation, everyman and baiter. A powerful bit of broadcasting that the BBC couldn’t ignore.

I also like arrogance as a rule. It may be rather un-British, but particularly when it’s proved right. He was the self-proclaimed saviour of Radio 1. And he delivered: He came in amid superhero posters and supposedly a few sharp words to the departing Sara Cox and… Increased and stabilised listener figures.

…That extraordinary mid-90s period when the radio was all
Kula Shaker, Space and Divine Comedy with ne’er a hip, a hop nor an R nor a B in sight…

I’d been through a few of Radio 1’s morning roster since the 90s. The underrated Kevin Greening, Zoe Ball… Before them, Steve Wright when I’d gained my first FM radio. I stuck with him through to Chris Evans in that extraordinary mid-90s period when the radio was all Kula Shaker, Space and Divine Comedy with ne’er a hip, a hop nor an R nor a B in sight. That was reserved for the lunchtime, when Lisa I’Anson provided my pre-GCSEs soundtrack. Thanks Manumission.

During the growing hip-hop revolution, I’d been forced to take prolonged breaks. Following Mark and Lard’s sublime but ill-thought through tenure, Sara Cox’s rather torrid breakfast reign had coincided with a slight political twinge and the Today Show had been dutifully programmed in. Until my hi-fi was nicked as I recall. That’ll teach me. During most of this time, I had listened to various Moyles’ shows as he toured the day schedules. I’d chatted amiably with friends about him and not really grasped the strangely impassioned arguments of the Moyles-haters. Late teen Moyles haters were and are as random as university Telegraph sales figures. But despite being an enthusiastic listener, Moyles’ wasn’t really my favourite show.

In February 2001, Simon Mayo departed Radio 1 and I dutifully I wrote a glowing requiem for a student rag (read: an incredibly brilliant and successful paper I’m immensely proud of). Mayo represented the real passing of the old guard on the station and it showed in his consummate broadcasting. Really, it hit me like a bolt. I’d spent many mornings hung-over, draped close to a radio, while his mid-morning show was on. I knew it emphatically, each feature and every nuance of his rather dry delivery. In hindsight, his show may have been elevated by Jo Whiley’s show following his. Thanks again Manumission.

Radio shows are perhaps the easiest of things to review. Repeated features and quirks that evolve over time or ‘definitely work’ or ‘definitely don’t work’. Add them all together and you have a biography for any show, reflecting its whole tenure or just a specific day, while analysing the presenter in a large wireless spotlight. That’s what I did with Mayo then, and yesterday the media paid no small attention to Moyles’ last show themselves. Articles ranged from celebratory to the mildly career-obituarial via run-downs of Moyles’ top controversies and even weight-loss. The Telegraph were particularly unimpressed. It was a rather subdued show, but after weeks of build-up, what did they expect but a few hours of ‘goodbye’.

In some ways 2006 looks like a career peak!

A quick glance at these articles ‘see also’ lists told its own story. January 2006: ‘Mighty Mouth’; May 2006: ‘No Show Leaves listeners Guessing’; June 2006: ‘Watchdog warns Radio 1 DJ over four letter words’. In some ways, 2006 looks like a career peak! Certainly Moyles was at the top of his game in the mornings, but he had been in the afternoons and weekends before that. Despite those headlines, the show had mellowed considerably since he arrived on the station. For one, I fully believe as a consummate professional radio presenter he was horrified when swear words fell through the system. There would always be the odd anti-BBC rant, the abuse of a BBC colleague – marginally incorrect, but compared to the late 90s when he had a reputation to bring to the public broadcaster, his outbursts were lighter and in-team arguments far shorter and softer. Of course yesterday, critics of the Moyles ‘cult’ were addressed briefly, but overall it was a gentle farewell. More gentle than most of those critcs would have expected I imagine, listening for the first time in years.

Arrogant, bigot, talentless, gob-shite… All words easy to level at a broadcaster. Certainly there was controversy, some of it easy to understand. But that’s not something that should necessarily have raised eyebrows when Moyles was appointed to Breakfast. It’s certainly no bad thing for the target demographic to hear something challenging or controversial. In many ways, they are the least impressionable listeners – and since the 1960s, I can think of a fair few pop or rock songs that have done worse. While I may have been a good age to follow the innuendo and dark humour into career, I doubt there were sixth-form classes filled with Moyles copy-cats.

I can’t think what those teenagers – or perhaps their younger siblings, recently weaned from Radio 2 in the car – thought of Chris Moyles on Radio 1 in recent times. It’s probably a fair distance from what an early teens me thought of Steve Wright, but not that far… Change is important, and in a station like Radio 1, with one of the most stringent demographic targets in the BBC, even more so. It can’t be doubted that a tremendous amount of work went into Moyles’ shows. Richard Curtis mentioned the ‘silences’ in that last show. Add to that the ever-late news, the poor timing, the half hours without music. These things are no less difficult to consistently ‘perform’ than Les Dawson’s piano technique (a target reference there, less removed from Moyles as he is from his lowest target demographic). I never heard a ‘bad’ show.

Still he lead a flagship BBC show while others fell around him…

While Moyles is Radio 1’s longest-running breakfast DJ by some distance, and its most controversial, it’s notable that his final years coincided with one of the Corporation’s most tumultuous periods. Budget cuts, competition downgrading, demise (refitting) of the Roadshows, text message restrictions, salary cuts, the rise of 1Xtra or resurrection of 6music – all these no doubt shaped the Radio 1 breakfast show from what it may have been. But still he lead a flagship BBC show while others fell around him. A ‘desperation for popularity’ is, you might think, a prerequisite for someone helming the most important radio show in the country.

Moyle’s off air Radio 1 career has been dwelt on as much as his thousands of hours on-air. A turbulent arrival, the unfortunate spat with John Peel… With his obvious peer friendships, but some deliberate perverseness for good measure, there was never a sense that Moyles ever sat with any particular generation in the classic Radio 1 sense. In fact, his persona required it. He was hardly the successor to DLT, wasn’t party to the bland Colin and Edith intake, nor bundled in with extraordinary, and short-lived, Wes or JK and Joel periods. But notwithstanding, he was certainly part of a team – from his ‘posse’ to the Radio 1 family. Often, even in an increasingly commercialised world, BBC values can still shine through. Perhaps that’s part of Moyles’ self-declared ‘institutionalisation’, part of this broadcaster 15 times longer than any other. When Kevin Greening died, Moyles’ tribute to a former colleague was heartfelt, and yesterday the next generation were effusive of Moyles. Of Greg James and his successor Nick Grimshaw, Moyles appears as universally scornful and generous as he was to many of his predecessors. While he may be divisive, his achievements, the ‘tough act to follow’, are not in doubt. That ‘victory’ he mentioned yesterday works on many levels. Of his many enemies over the years, they generally fall into two camps: now friends or long fallen from the dial.

There is a neat bookending to the end of Moyles’ career. Aside from the ironic Cox after-show, I recall a random monster night on BBC 2, almost certainly late last century. This not only marked a crucial development in my appreciation of Godzilla, Japanese analogy and smashing up towns, but also the first time I’d seen Moyles on TV. It can’t have been long after the infamous Sky magazine splashes. Also present were Paul Ross, Bill Bailey and Phil Jupitus: it was a heavyweight panel for a heavyweight subject. Those present were certainly guarded at the new Radio 1 upstart’s presence and I can’t remember that he said much. Jupitus would soon be launching the inaugural 6music breakfast show and in course, 15 or so years later Moyles recommended listeners to Shaun Keaveny show, Jupitus’ successor. 6music listeners, often with a choice music snobbishness I quite appreciate, flew to Twitter to point out that Moyles had clearly never listened to Keaveny’s show. Moyles had admitted as much – not unexpectedly considering his working day – but you can’t think that he didn’t know what he was doing. Moyles’ listeners will likely split between 1, 2, 6 and some commercial stations. Things come around.

The final show had to end with a musical number, of course. Moyles is as defined by his colourful jingles as the royalties he legendarily earned from them. Stepping from Broadcasting House and crossing the road was profound. It’s also a rather emphatic gesture. Any past-tense here is because the BBC door appears shut. That said, I came to praise Moyles, certainly not to bury him. Next stop of course is an arena tour and musically sentencing the Messiah to crucifixion.

Judging by BBC’s approach to Grimshaw, Moyles may be the last classic Radio 1 DJ. It’s a loose club, but his subversion and homage has been format-changingly successful. Grimshaw seems an astute choice, but I’ve no time here to talk about him any more than the other significant contributors to the Chris Moyles Show – and that’s not in anyway to their detriment; there’s just one name above the bar.

Re-reading that Mayo piece after a decade, its clear time has changed and so have I. Thank Manumission! I’ve drifted in and out of Moyles’ tenure, through Woof Woof Beards and Car Park Catchphrases and am unable to point fingers specifically in the way I could with Mayo. Time and life have caught up I guess. But to the end, his show still made me laugh. What the hell is going to do that now?